Autocar December 7, 2022

FORGIVE THE indulgent editor’s letter – but if you can’t at Christmas, when can you? We put love, sweat and (occasionally) tears into every edition of Autocar but none more than this, the Christmas bumper issue. Planning starts in August for this festive extravaganza, in which we stretch the boundaries of our regular content and imaginations. Hence, over the following pages, you’ll find Matt Prior road testing a British-designed £5 million hovercraft, a six-year-old cornering a drop-top sports car and this year’s take on our Christmas road trip – sometimes tenuous but always brilliant – where we follow the Pole Star in, you guessed it, a Polestar. While this is the official Autocar Christmas issue, we are sneaking in another mega mag on 21 December to carry you through to…

FORGIVE THE indulgent editor’s letter – but if you can’t at Christmas, when can you? We put love, sweat and (occasionally) tears into every edition of Autocar but none more than this, the Christmas bumper issue. Planning starts in August for this festive extravaganza, in which we stretch the boundaries of our regular content and imaginations. Hence, over the following pages, you’ll find Matt Prior road testing a British-designed £5 million hovercraft, a six-year-old cornering a drop-top sports car and this year’s take on our Christmas road trip – sometimes tenuous but always brilliant – where we follow the Pole Star in, you guessed it, a Polestar. While this is the official Autocar Christmas issue, we are sneaking in another mega mag on 21 December to carry you through to the new…

The Mercedes-AMG S63 has been reborn as a plug-in hybrid performance saloon housing an electrically assisted 4.0-litre V8 that develops up to 791bhp. Set for UK sale early next year, the luxury super-saloon runs an updated version of the twin-turbocharged engine used by its predecessor, but now adopts a rear-axlemounted electric motor and a 13.1kWh lithium ion battery. The set-up is similar to that of the Mercedes-AMG performance car division’s recently introduced GT 63 S E Performance. The new petrol-electric drivetrain brings an additional 214bhp over the old S63, which makes the 2023 model – officially called the S63 E Performance – the most powerful series-production S-Class model to date. Even more impressive is the increase in torque: up by 391lb ft to 1054lb ft. This means the new S63’s reserves eclipse those…

The Mercedes-AMG S63 has been reborn as a plug-in hybrid performance saloon housing an electrically assisted 4.0-litre V8 that develops up to 791bhp. Set for UK sale early next year, the luxury super-saloon runs an updated version of the twin-turbocharged engine used by its predecessor, but now adopts a rear-axlemounted electric motor and a 13.1kWh lithium ion battery. The set-up is similar to that of the Mercedes-AMG performance car division’s recently introduced GT 63 S E Performance. The new petrol-electric drivetrain brings an additional 214bhp over the old S63, which makes the 2023 model – officially called the S63 E Performance – the most powerful series-production S-Class model to date. Even more impressive is the increase in torque: up by 391lb ft to 1054lb ft. This means the new S63’s…

The Mercedes-AMG S63 E Performance neatly typifies a particular response to a challenge that many luxury performance brands like Mercedes-AMG will need to negotiate over the coming years: how do you carve out a selling point for a driver’s car that drives itself? The S-Class is Mercedes’ first car capable of level-three (hands-off) self-driving, albeit in only a few countries where local legislation allows. (As it stands, the UK is not one of them.) As with other new S-Classes, customers will be able to engage a supervised self-driving mode – although only on particular roads preapproved by Mercedes and marked in the car’s navigation system, and then only when the car is in heavy traffic moving at less than 40mph. The S63 isn’t quite ready to drive itself at 155mph on the…

The Mercedes-AMG S63 E Performance neatly typifies a particular response to a challenge that many luxury performance brands like Mercedes-AMG will need to negotiate over the coming years: how do you carve out a selling point for a driver’s car that drives itself? The S-Class is Mercedes’ first car capable of level-three (hands-off) self-driving, albeit in only a few countries where local legislation allows. (As it stands, the UK is not one of them.) As with other new S-Classes, customers will be able to engage a supervised self-driving mode – although only on particular roads preapproved by Mercedes and marked in the car’s navigation system, and then only when the car is in heavy traffic moving at less than 40mph. The S63 isn’t quite ready to drive itself at 155mph…